Aaron Copland’s popular Clarinet Concerto, with its tender and poignant opening, highly virtuosic central cadenza and brilliantly jazzy final movement, is preceded by Robert L Aldridge’s Clarinet Concerto, which has been described as the direct descendant of the Copland. Classical, folk, jazz and klezmer influences are brought together in a work which is infectious in its driving rhythms and soaring melodies, and it is here presented in a world premiere recording.

Aldridge’s Samba for clarinet and string quartet is an attempt to make this instrumentation sound like a Latin big-band.

David Singer, the acclaimed longtime principal clarinetist of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, is joined on this recording by the internationally renowned Shanghai Quartet and A Far Cry Orchestra, a Boston-based collective of young professional string players who perform without a conductor and with rotating leadership.